Hey, this is a question I ask a lot of good ele player:
What does it take to make DPS Staff ele viable in spvp.? Doesnt have to be the glass one with Berserker but the standard one with Valkyrie or Soldier. I know it is pretty bad right now so what changes do you think would help?
Thanks ahead Powerr.
I’ve tried a lot of ways to make staff work for general sPvP (Public, PUG tournament teams), without much success.
I’d venture to say that Staff might only be useful in a very proper, team specific context. I note that in the (linked above) PZ forums, there is also a staff build listed.
As far as your question goes, it doesn’t take a top-ranked sPvP player to note some of the pitfalls of the staff ele. Too many attacks are based on ground-targeting, which are readily dodged. Compounding the problem is that skills like Meteor, Glacial, and Eruption take a massive amount of time to trigger. There’s a small blurb above about the complexity of effectively using DT. The troubles here similar, except the staff Ele has many of these skills.
Improvements to make the staff individually more viable would be making the attacks quicker, or providing a more readily available stun. Obviously there’s the PvP/PvE balance to consider, as many of these skills are already very powerful in PvE. NPC mobs and to some extent, WvW zergs don’t really make it a habit of avoiding AOE attacks, and the Staff is a devastating force in these situations. Buffing it would take a bit of care.
One of the proposed solutions (for the general AOE-nerf discussion) is to make the spells themselves more powerful, but reduce their duration and increase the cooldowns. The WvW purpose this serves is to reduce the ability to keep a chokepoint bogged in a deathtrap of spells. While this would be a nerf of sorts for that format, it would give a Staff Ele a small lift at sPvP, as it does greatly improve the ease of landing the full spell effect.
